‘Egregious’ Donald Trump App Can Vacuum Up Your Contact List, Tech Experts Say

GOP nominee’s “America First” app is under fire for questionable fine print

'Egregious' Donald Trump App Can Vacuum Your Contact List, Tech Experts Say
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Donald Trump’s app many be cleaning out your contact list without your knowledge.

According to ABC News, people who download the Trump new app, “America First,” are unwittingly giving the GOP candidate permission to vacuum up all their contacts.

While the app’s privacy policy does include a warning in its fine print, electronic privacy experts told ABC News they had “concerns” about the scope of the app’s collection data abilities, despite it being legal.

At issue: Users are unknowingly exposing their contacts to undesired campaign communications, opening themselves up to potential abuses should the campaign suffer a data breach.

Trump’s representatives did not immediately respond to TheWrap’s request for comment.

Hillary Clinton’s app, launched in July, also collects data, but experts say the info gathered is limited to things like what kind of phone the user has and their mobile network provider.

What worries privacy experts is the fact that the Trump app “goes a step further,” collecting information about other individuals through the user’s contact book.

“Trump’s [app] is asking to collect significantly more data, and not just data about you, but data about anyone who might be in your contact list,” Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director at the ACLU of Northern California, told ABC News.

Another privacy expert called Trump’s app practice “egregious.”

Security experts also note that address books sometimes contain more than just a contact’s phone numbers and email addresses. In some cases, contacts may contain even more sensitive info, including health-related data, snippets of emails, passwords and Social Security numbers.

ABC News journalists testing the app report that they were presented with a pop-up screen requesting access to their address book.

But experts warn that privacy policies often go unread, with some users impatiently clicking through pop-ups asking for permission to access the data.

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